We Can Only Save Ourselves Page 4

  Inside Bev’s home, all evidence of Timmy and Todd’s existence had been erased. No stinky shoes by the door, no sound of roughhousing coming from the backyard. Instead, a crystal bowl filled with punch beside a tall vase of flowers on the dining table, where a tray of fruit and cheese had been set out. Plastic containers and bowls and lids were arranged artfully on the coffee table next to a low arrangement of flowers. Already, a few of us were picking up the Tupperware, unsealing the lids, listening to that satisfying burp of air and then securing the tops again.

  “I burned the cookies,” Bev said when Charlotte walked in. She immediately took the pie from her guest and handed it to April, who scurried off to serve it to the rest of us. “You’re a lifesaver,” Bev said. “As well as a mind reader. Thank you. Anyway, make yourselves at home!”

  We remember this party so well because of what came after. Imagine Alice as she looked then, sitting with her mother on the sofa, Mrs. Lange’s hands absentmindedly feeling the tips of her daughter’s hair, twisting them around her fingers; picture the way the ends curled lightly in different directions, like a road sign pointing to all the ways a person could go.

  Susannah sat across from Alice with the coffee table between them, and though they didn’t speak, they looked at each other and crossed their eyes when one of the mothers said something they found silly. They didn’t act strangely, at least not at first. We chatted about the game, congratulated Alice on cheering the boys to victory.

  Alice only shrugged. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Sure you did. A team can’t win with low morale,” said Charlotte Price.

  “Alice, Susannah,” interrupted Mags, “let us old ladies”—laughter here; none of us are old, not really—“live vicariously through you. Tell us about your dresses for homecoming.” Soon Bev would shush us all and expound on the merits of Tupperware, but until then we were happy to hear the girls talk about their homecoming plans. “Mine was green,” Mags told them.

  “Lavender,” said Charlotte, sighing at the memory.

  “Pink,” said Karen Prescott. Alice looked around, thought of us as plucked flowers, soft and limp and briefly beautiful.

  “Mine is pink too,” said Susannah. “But not a gaudy pink, it’s a nice pink, kind of soft.”

  “Baby pink,” said Mags.

  “Blush,” offered April.

  “Exactly,” said Susannah in that low voice of hers. “And strapless.” She shivered a little when she said it; she’d never worn a strapless dress before, but now she imagined the touch of someone’s hands on those bare shoulders, on her collarbone, and shivered again. Next to her, her mother noticed the tremor and draped an arm across her shoulders, covered now by a light-green sweater. She had thought about the bare shoulders too.

  “Mine’s about the same,” said Alice when we all looked at her, waiting for her to speak. “Only red.”

  “I’m sure it’s not exactly the same,” April said. “I’m sure it’s special in its own way.”

  But Alice shook her head, gaze soft and sweet and a little resigned. “No,” she said. “It’s about the same as everyone else’s.”

  We looked at each other. This should have been a clue that something wasn’t right with Alice; normally, she would have said yes, it’s got this kind of hem, this kind of neckline, it’s red as a rose, but instead there she was saying no. Not rudely. Just vacantly, as if she weren’t thinking of us at all, of what we wanted.

  “Well, you should at least make sure you style your hair so that the crown will fit on top of it,” joked Mags.

  But Alice shook her head again. “I’m not going to win, actually,” she said, and Susannah looked at her, eyes wide. “But it’s okay.”

  “I hadn’t realized you could see the future, Alice,” said Charlotte, who had been homecoming queen in the small town where she grew up, smack dab in the middle of the country. It was a dusty place, wretched in the summer and bitter in the winter, but still, she had been its queen.

  “I don’t need to,” said Alice. But suddenly she could see the future, and it wasn’t here.

  Mrs. Lange had taken her hands away from Alice’s hair and now squeezed her leg. “It really is okay either way,” she said.

  “It’s actually kind of stupid,” Alice said, “in the grand scheme of things. It’s all kind of stupid.”

  Around the room we stiffened. Backs straightened, legs uncrossed and crossed again; we tucked our hair behind our ears. Alice took a sip of punch and put her glass down neatly on a coaster. She looked around, and she was pleased at the reaction, how we all tensed up, how we were all trying to translate what she had said. What was stupid, exactly? The dance? The dress? The desire to be queen? But we didn’t ask. We felt embarrassed for her mother, who looked at her daughter with concern but also with amusement and pride, like Alice had suddenly begun speaking in tongues: it was alarming, but also, in its own way, impressive.

  “It isn’t stupid,” Charlotte said. “It’s tradition.”

  “What about dates?” asked April quickly.

  “We’re going in a group with other girls,” said Susannah. “No boys allowed.” She let out a laugh, but it wasn’t a genuine one. It sounded like a cough. “It will be more fun that way, right, Alice? This way we can dance with whomever we want.”

  “Right,” said Alice.

  “No boys!” exclaimed Mags, glancing first at Susannah and then at Alice. “I can hardly believe you two couldn’t find dates.”

  “We chose not to find dates,” said Alice, who was suddenly feeling proud and defensive of this decision, though it had only come about because Susannah had wanted to go with Charles Wilbur, and he hadn’t asked her, and she had been crushed. “Let’s go together,” Alice had said, stroking her friend’s hair. “You and me and the other girls. Who needs boys anyway?” But now, in her mind, it became something else, a crucial and inextricable part of herself that she couldn’t deny.

  Charlotte raised her eyebrows, two thin dark arches. “Now, that’s what seems stupid,” she said. “People will think no one wanted to take you.” Susannah blushed. She thought of Charles Wilbur, the way his legs looked in his basketball shorts. He was taking a younger girl, an elegant sophomore with long red hair. But Alice Lange was taking her. “Or,” Charlotte went on, her eyebrows inching even higher, “they’ll think you aren’t interested in—”

  “That’s okay,” Alice said politely, hands in her lap loosely holding again her cup of punch. “I don’t mind if they think either of those things.” She didn’t look at Susannah, who she knew did mind a little bit.

  “Martha, are you going to let her talk like this?” Charlotte asked Mrs. Lange. “She sounds like an insane person.” Now Alice laughed. When she tilted her head back, her white throat glowed like mother of pearl.

  “She’s going to have a wonderful time,” her mother said, looking sharply at Charlotte, who stared right back, her eyes small and round and hard, like dark marbles. Mrs. Lange could see each swipe of mascara Charlotte had applied before coming, hoping to widen them. “Bev,” Mrs. Lange finally said, searching the room for her hostess, “I’m very interested in this container.” She held up an olive-colored one. “Are there more sizes in this shape?”

  Bev, who had been hovering at the edge of the room and marveling at the conversation, thought Alice Lange seemed possessed. She rubbed her stomach, which was round now when it had seemed flat only last week. “That one,” she said, moving toward Mrs. Lange, “that one does come in three sizes, and they’re all stackable so they’ll take up less room in your cabinets. They’re like those Russian dolls.”

  “Excellent!” said Mrs. Lange. “That’s exactly what I need.”

  “I won’t say it’s revolutionary,” Bev said, “but I’ll say it’s always nice to have extra space.” We all agreed with that. We listened as she modeled the containers, prying off the lids and then resealing them, and passed them around the room. They held in smells, they kept things fresh, if you dropped them and th
e lid was on correctly nothing would leak. What you’d worked hard to prepare could be saved: a small miracle. We each bought two.

  Toward the end of the party, Nancy Wright, Millie’s mother, blustered in. She was sorry she was late, but Millie had been upset and hadn’t wanted to come. (Is it only in our imagination that she glanced at Alice when she said that?) There had been some fire, she said, an accident or maybe sabotage by another class, and the senior float had been destroyed. Terrible! we all murmured. Who would do such a thing?

  “Me,” said Alice, and we laughed. Her mother rolled her eyes. “Oh, Alice,” she said. “Silly girl.” From her chair across from Alice, Susannah said nothing.

  When we left, we thanked Bev. We offered to help clean up, but she told us no. She would return Charlotte Price’s pie dish later. We had done enough, she said, we had been so generous. “Have fun tonight,” she said to Alice. “Girls always have more fun with other girls anyway.”

  The Langes were the only ones left by that point, besides April, who Bev did let tidy up the kitchen.

  “Thanks,” said Alice. She looked at Bev. “My dress has a little line of tiny pearls along the neckline,” Alice said finally. “That’s what makes it different.”

  “It sounds pretty,” Bev said, and she seemed like the Alice she had known since she was a little girl with skinned knees, whipping past on her bicycle. She must have been having a bad day, or—she thought of Alice and Susannah going together to the dance—maybe there was boy trouble or something else shameful she didn’t want to talk about. “Thanks again,” said Mrs. Lange, and the pair left, walking down the driveway.

  Bev was about to go back inside when she noticed that Mrs. Lange had taken her daughter’s hand in her own, like Alice was a little girl, the way Bev held Timmy’s hand on the occasions he let her, and that Alice didn’t shake her off. They walked together across the street and down the sidewalk, and Bev kept watching until they got to their house. They must have left the door unlocked because neither of them reached for a key. But Mrs. Lange let go of Alice’s hand to open the door, and for some reason Bev felt a foreboding sense of sadness watching them disconnect, the mother’s hand turning the knob, reaching to her daughter to sweep her in. The girl’s hands empty and aimless, rudderless. Hold on to her! Bev wanted to cry out. Hurry!

  But then they were inside and out of her sight, and later, when Alice was gone for good, Bev wondered if she had really felt that worry in the first place or if she had simply remembered it wrong or, now that she had a tiny new daughter of her own, if she was catching a glimpse of her future self, wanting to hold her daughter’s hand but, for some reason, letting go.

  Chapter Six

  BY THE TIME we knew for sure Alice had anything to do with the vandalism, she had vanished. Weeks later, the school suspended Ben for his involvement because, weighed down by guilt and grief, he had come forward and confessed. “They were my matches,” he said. “Alice didn’t do anything.” His mother felt both proud and disappointed—proud of his integrity, disappointed in his last gesture of devotion to a girl who, she knew, would never love him back. How ordinary, she thought, to love a girl like Alice Lange.

  Lucky Andrew escaped punishment. Susannah did too. For her own complicated reasons, Millie, who had tattled on Alice, never named anyone else.

  When Ben returned to school after his suspension, he had become a kind of folk hero. He caught whispered snatches of his name when he passed, his and Andrew’s and sometimes Susannah’s, though the world, for some reason, had mostly forgotten she was ever there at all. He heard Alice Lange’s name as well, but in a different sort of tone: she had become a legend, too, a darker one that no one understood.

  Just a few hours after the Tupperware party, Alice poked her head into the laundry room where her mother was putting a load into the washing machine. “Bye!” she said, and her mother jumped.

  “Alice, you scared me,” she said, turning to look at her daughter. She smiled when she saw the brown bag Alice carried—it had been her own years ago. “Off to Susannah’s?”

  Alice nodded. Mrs. Lange was sad not to see her daughter off to the dance, but she knew it was important for Alice to go. She and Susannah always got ready for dances and outings together, alternating houses each time; this time it was Susannah’s, but spring prom, the last dance of Alice’s high school years, would be hers and wasn’t that the more important one? There would always be more time with Alice, and, after all, this was only one of the many goodbyes she would have to wish her daughter in her lifetime. “Have fun, sweetie,” she said.

  Alice remained in the doorway, watching her mother feed piece after piece of her clothing into the mouth of the washing machine, and her stomach clenched with guilt. How many dresses of hers had her mother washed over the years? How many pairs of socks? But she knew she couldn’t stay; her time here—with her mother, with us—was over. Placing her hand on her mother’s shoulder, Alice leaned in and kissed her cheek.

  (From that night on, Mrs. Lange never slept soundly again, tortured by dreams in which Alice was tantalizingly nearby, just on the horizon, near enough to hear her mother calling and wave at her from far away, but never close enough to touch. She replayed Alice’s good-bye kiss in the laundry room over and over in her thoughts, searching her memory of it for any clue of when her daughter would be home. The dry, quick feeling of her lips on her cheek. Alice’s fingertips on her shoulder. Was any of it a promise? The way she slung that purse, Mrs. Lange’s old bag, over her shoulder. How happy she had been to see Alice using something of hers. It was so hard with teenagers; you never knew if they loved you or hated you, and maybe Alice choosing that bag of hers was a secret signal to her mother that there was a part of Alice that still wanted to become her when she grew up, the way she had when she was a little, little girl, and her mother was the total embodiment of her joy and comfort, back when she hadn’t even begun to conceive of herself as a different being with a body, a brain, and a heart all her own.)

  “Good-bye, honey,” Mrs. Lange said, and then Alice was gone.

  Several of us saw Alice leave her house, a small bag in one hand. She didn’t slam the door behind her, and no one came after her. She wasn’t running, but she walked quickly, kept her head down as though she were being careful not to trip in the day’s dimming light. The trees here, in the fall, drop leaves and little seeds like small nuts, and Alice crunched her way through them as she hurried down the sidewalk. She was wearing tennis shoes and could feel the snap of the leaves and seeds under her thin soles. An airplane flew overhead, and for a moment she stopped and looked up, and we saw her face, and this was the odd thing: she wasn’t sad. She had always thought her real life would begin in college, almost a year from now, but she was wrong. It was beginning now, with a hundred slips of paper in a cardboard box, with the strike of a match, a red dress she would leave hanging in her closet, the pearls like a line of bright, unblinking eyes.

  She wore a sweater and jeans, and her long hair was down, hanging past her shoulders. She had the hair color so many girls would kill for, so brilliant and shiny that in the light it seemed to glow, and that’s what we watched turn the corner—that bright head bobbing along past the houses of her neighbors—before she was gone. That’s how long it took her to disappear: practically no time at all.

  Chapter Seven

  CARL MILLER DROPPED Alice off at the beach, the same one she and Susannah had grown up going to, whose sand probably still hid Coke bottle tops they had buried there, had used as decorations on the castles their little hands had built. It was where she had gotten her first kiss on the lips; it was where she had ducked under waves, headfirst; where she smoked her first cigarette, drank her first beer, coughing, sputtering on all three occasions, and now it was the only place she could think of going.

  She had slept at Carl’s, with Carl, the night before; he was the youngest child in a large family, the only one still living at home, and his parents never seemed to care what he did or where
he went or who he had over to the house, something that always struck Alice as both sad and desirable. When she turned the corner of our street, it was Carl’s green car, cheery and round, that waited to take her away to a different life. Or perhaps the life would be the same, and it would be she who was different. Or maybe she would go home tomorrow, back to her mother. She wasn’t sure yet.

  It was late afternoon, and the day was gray, though not rainy. (It never rained here.) The only moisture in the air was from the ocean, a feeling that made you think the ocean wasn’t just ahead of you but behind and above you too. Gulls wheeled and dove, and in the distance she saw wet-suited surfers, shiny and sleek as otters. She rolled the window down. The air was briny. It was quiet.

  “I’m just supposed to let you out?” asked Carl. He was looking at the thin clouds rolling in, as though they were a kind of threat to the girl in his passenger seat.

  “Yep,” said Alice. “Thanks again. I appreciate your help.” Her hand was already on the door handle, the small overnight bag on her lap. “Good-bye,” she said. But then she reached over and kissed him. His mouth tasted like orange juice, and she thought of him standing in the kitchen that morning before they left his house, tipping the carton right into his mouth, a bright and sunny orange box. He had offered it to her next; no, thank you, she had said.

  She shut the car door and walked toward the water, slipping her shoes off as she went. She held them by the laces, let them dangle against her leg. When she looked back over her shoulder, the little green car was gone.

  Alice picked a place to stop and sat there for a while, looking out at the ocean, but for all the times she had been at the beach, all the life it represented for her, it wasn’t a place that calmed her. It did not inspire her to think deeply or poetically. Until this moment, from the time she felt Ben press the matchbook in her hand to the kiss she gave her mother on her way out the door, everything had been clear and easy, each decision unrolling before her like a ribbon.